Jake

Too bad. I've always been fascinated by the yips, but there's no telling how it will go. Maybe he snaps out of it, but who knows on what timeline if it ever does happen. Pitchers are lucky enough as it is to have the health to be successful for very long, so it's already an uphill battle. Look to Daniel Bard for a best-case scenario, probably. Look to ex-Sox farmhand Alec Hansen for the more likely outcome.

I'm not big on predictions but as far as W-L my main goal for the Sox this year is don't lose 100 games. Beyond that, given that I don't think there was any world in which they'd be a stone's throw from the last wild card spot, it's ultimately all about identifying the players and positions you're going to have covered going forward. 75 wins on the backs of a Fedde-Benny renaissance would be worse than 65 wins with strong seasons by 3-5 <27-year-old guys. I'm really looking forward to getting Teel back and seeing whether he can 1. maintain last year's performance and 2. take a step forward from there. After that, the most likely to be interesting breakout guys are Braden Montgomery and Sam Antonacci. What Colson is going to do is an important question that I don't know the answer to. I think Chase and Vargas are pretty likely to be solid everyday players with neither super likely to take a star turn. I think Lenyn deserves to play just about every day but I see him as harder to predict...flashing power potential has increased his upside but he's become increasingly one-dimensional and his approach makes his profile risky. Luisangel is a wildcard who I'd like to see play every day but am not really counting on for anything. I feel similarly about Pereira but would be less afraid to cut bait with him if he has a bad few weeks of play. Performance of Braden Montgomery is pretty important to me because there's a serious void of impact talent between AA and AAA besides him. I think there's going to be enough solid guys I think but not a ton of upside guys around from AA upwards... I'd say you're looking at just the two Montgomerys and Teel (and Teel is somewhat living on positional adjustments for that eval). I'm not counting Mune here because of his contract status. Bonemer is a nice prospect of course but he's far enough from MLB that I'm not going to key in on his performance this year too much. On the pitching side, to me the Earth revolves around the two lefties in AAA. There are plenty of other developments that can matter but they're the most interesting pieces and the ones that still seem to have a very wide variety of potential outcomes in front of them. I'll admit to moving my own evaluation of Schultz towards a lower ceiling and higher floor but still that ceiling includes some potentially very high value. I hold out some hope for getting value from Thorpe as well so it will be interesting to see how he looks when he returns. There's a critical mass of potential innings-eaters types so sorting out the Burke-Smith-Cannon-Sandlin-Davitt-Bush-etc. is important business but kind of boring.

Do I remember correctly that Everson Pereira is expected back before long?

This series comes down to Gunnar Henderson, Austin Hays's hamstring, and Reese McGuire's glove hand

This guy throws a Drew Thorpe changeup. Doesn't drop at all relative to his fastball, which itself has great rise. Very confusing to hitters used to seeing those pitches falling off the table. Hitters have whiffed on over 80% of their cuts against it this season

This series hasn't moved me very much. Pitching pleasantly competitive. A lot of ABs going to guys who are not really part of the plan right now.

Welp

I've been a bit of a Burke hater, but he's pretty much earned my confidence as a guy who is going to give you serviceable performance and is able to keep things from getting out of control.

Felt like Peters took a while to get that throw in

Similar propensity for "heady" plays of that kind, taking extra bases and such

Sox slowly but surely compiling these annoying-to-play-against guys like Meidroth, Vargas, and soon Antonacci

Makes no sense to me

Confirming my suspicions, Mune has barely made contact with a pitch in the outer third yet. They'll probably keep attacking him out there until he figures it out. Luckily, he hasn't chased too much and he generally kills pitches in the middle third so pitchers really need to execute to get him.

Mune tends to take some odd looking swings at pitches on the outside part of the plate

That was a horrific at bat by Peters

Not sure that Hudson will be part of the team by tomorrow's game.

It's like they got Quero trying to take more aggressive cuts in order to get into his power, but the end result has been that he's losing his pitch recognition without any of the "hitting the ball harder" that is supposed to be part of the tradeoff. This is a player who hit 12 HR in 72 games in a pretty low-offense AA league in 2024 so it's not like he's incapable of being something other than a singles hitter when things are going well. Being so young there's reason to think that a demotion wouldn't have to be a permanent thing, especially given how short his time in Charlotte was.

Pretty clear that Edgar has totally lost his confidence, he ought to at least get a couple days off. Obviously if this continues when Teel returns, they probably should send him to Charlotte to go figure some things out.

Colson might want to start leaning into those things for as long as the scouting report continues to indicate he can't hit anything high and inside.

I'm a little unclear on what Will was supposed to do today. His starter went 3.2 innings. Hicks is a converted starter who looked utterly dominant in his first inning of work. Pretty clear we weren't going to let him pitch to Gunnar, who is instead faced by Murphy who is IMO the more trustworthy of the two lefties left in the pen. Gunnar is a hall of fame talent and hit a screamer that snuck out of the stadium. s%*# happens, should have hit more earlier today.

Kinda funny because although Gunnar smacked that thing, he hit it too low to get out of that part of ballpark more often than not...but the ball carried more than you'd expect. So somebody is getting the ball to carry today!

The difference between these two teams appears to be just Gunnar Henderson and I guess I can live with that

They know what's coming so they just stick the bat out and it finds the corner twice in a row

Alexander using so much pine tar he couldn't get the bat off of his hand lol

Imagine getting jammed by a 98mph sinker in this weather